Monday, January 19, 2009

Aramco Half Marathon

I managed to finish the Aramco Houston Half-Marathon yesterday. I wouldn't say my time was bad given the limited amount of training on my part, but I wouldn't say that the experience was all that great either. I'm 90% sure I had a fever the night before, and, given the incredible amount of confidence I had in my training and previous half marathon experience, I wasn't the most excited participant at 5:whatever it was when it was time to get up to run 13.1 miles for fun.

The last half I participated in (after which I told myself would be the last) I entered with a similar regiment of half hearted training runs (to be fair it was actually a training run) that began less than a week before the gun shot to start the race. I told myself I wouldn't do that again. And then I did it again.

I feel like this little pattern creeps us a little too often in my life. I'm going to read more, and then I don't. I'm going to do be less busy, after I get everything done. I'm going to grade more, I'm going to study more, I'm going to come up with a million great ideas, talk about them, and likely leave them there.

So now that I've realized this, it's time I find some ways to hold myself to a short list of things I really feel are worthwhile. The hardest thing when trying to whittle down the list is that there are just so many great things I could throw myself into these days. My family, my church, my job, and several of my other interests all give me a great looking list of things for me to make myself busy with, but it's time to choose. Otherwise I'll end up with just that, a great list.

In future posts, you may or may not see more about this, but this is where the blog is restarting. 

Further evidence of the need for this type of dedication to discipline in my life can be seen when viewing this photograph from Houston's ABC13. On top of not performing so well during my mediocre run, I appear to be running against thousands of people who are all at least 8-10 inches shorter than I am. Not good.